spent Sunday
morning in his study, writing letters; her mother had carried the more
devout members of the party to mass and from mass to a vague, bored
exploration of the garden, where they could be seen scattered on the
lowest terrace, trying to make friends with an unresponsive peacock; the
men, headed by Pentyre, were warmly entrenched round the smoking-room
fire in a blue tobacco-haze and a litter of Sunday papers. George
Oakleigh, in naval uniform, was unashamedly sleeping in a deep
window-embrasure, his mouth open and his eyeglasses on his knees.
Deganway and Carstairs were arguing in subdued tones and seemed as
vacantly uninterested as Pentyre, who had exhausted the _feuilleton_ of
his paper and was studying the advertisements.

She was pleased by the stir with which her entrance galvanized them into
alertness, by Oakleigh's sympathetic enquiries, even by Deganway's
critical examination of her dress.

"Well, make the most of me, everybody," she said. "I'm going back to bed
immediately after lunch. What's everybody doing?"

"I've been asleep," Oakleigh answered contentedly.

Barbara looked round her and wrinkled her nose.

"What are you _going_ to do?" she pursued.

"I should like to go _on_ sleeping. . . ."

"Come for a walk, Babs," interrupted Pentyre. "It's my last leave----"

"Then you'd better rest instead of working on my emotions. George, on
the other hand, never gets any exercise at the Admiralty, and, as he's
never been here before, I think I shall take him round the house.
Besides, he hasn't _asked_ me to do anything. Come on, George!"

Oakleigh rose with sufficient alacrity and accompanied her for an hour
through the ruins of the Abbey, the Elizabethan reconstruction and the
Georgian incrustation. Knowing Barbara, he had secured what he wanted by
pretended indifference, though he was less interested in hall and
refectory, Prior's house and dormitory than in her knowledge of
architecture and early English furniture.

"Another of my accomplishments," she laughed. "George, what sort of
reputation _have_ I got? A man was so surprised the other day to find
that I could play the piano and sing. . . ."

"I know what _I_ think of you," he answered. "Possibly you know it too."

Barbara looked away abstractedly, as though she had not heard him. Ever
since her illness, George had shewn her a tender devotion; and, when
Sonia Dainton and her other friends had succumbed to the war-epidemic of
marriage,